I was a KGB spy

I was a KGB agent - that is, I wanted to be a KGB agent. I used to hang out at the Soviet Embassy pretending I wasn't just picking up Russian magazines and newspapers.

Across the road, rumour had it the NZ security service photographed everyone who came and went. Sometimes I'd wave - just to be a smartarse - at other times, I'd slink out holding magazines up over my face.

I guess if New Zealand had important secrets - and I was party to them - the Russians may have been more interested. At any rate, I was never recruited, nor caught in a honey trap. Pity - I would've liked being caught in a KGB honey trap.

'Notorious Soviet spy arrested!' the headlines would scream. There would be me - face shielded from the cameras with a copy of 'Spotlight on Astrakhan' by Panorama Press. I think I would've liked being 'notorious.'

Leningrad was far more interesting in those magazines than in the flesh. It was cold, it was full of architecture and tourists - not unlike most old European cities. It was cluttered with drunken Finns and plain clothes cops - militsya in shades and ill-fitting suits.

The cops were more worried about the Finns pissing in the seventeen century fountains than the clusters of illegal foreign currency traders.

Leningraders wanted dollars, Levi jeans, T-shirts and rock records. Dealers called Yuri would descend - all the while nervously watching for the militsya, who couldn't give a fuck, but, they wanted a percentage.

1979 - the Soviets had just entered Afghanistan offering fraternal assistance to the Afghan people. It said so in Tass, and to prove it, smiling Soviet Tajik soldiers offered cigarettes to smiling Afghan soldiers.

What was the opinion of socialist youth? A shrug, and 'I'll give you ten rubles for your watch.'

I went back to Stockholm with the opinion that THAT socialist paradise wasn't exactly MY socialist paradise. There were too many cops, too much paranoia, as much capitalism as anywhere and utterly boring newspapers.

I stayed with the local 'Trots,' the Swedish Socialist Workers. With social legislation light years ahead of just about anybody, I wondered why the Hell they had a Socialist Workers Party. I made friends with the 'raggiare,' Swedish retro rockers who liked old American cars and faded denim.

1979, too, was the onset of the Iranian Revolution. I was down in Copenhagen and the hostel was full of an interesting mix of ex employees of the Shah and members of Iranian Communist Youth - still wearing their red neck scarves.

These disparate refugees found common cause to lay every Western woman under the age of eighty. In this enterprise they were only partially successful, but even so, an extraordinary number of English female backpackers succumbed to their charms. I wished there was something more than a curtain separating the sleeping areas.

For all that, the Iranians were smart, interesting people with passable English. Most had been educated in Europe and America - middle class and from Tehran and Isfahan.

Had they been in fear of their lives? Sort of - they'd mostly escaped the draft.

Lentils, Talking Heads, nocturnal humping and Iranian draft dodgers are my memories of that godawful Danish hostel.

In 1992 I married an English/Iranian. I'm thinking of applying to the spy department of the Iranian Revolutionary Council. Life seems to have this weird symmetry.

Don